Casting news: Naomi Watts as Princess Diana
If all goes as planned…
The Hollywood Reporter says that Academy Award nominee Naomi Watts (21 Grams, 2003) – not the previously rumored Jessica Chastain – will get to play Princess Diana in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Caught in Flight, whose distribution rights producing company Ecosse Films is offering to the highest bidder at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. As per the Reporter, production is slated to begin in the U.K. later this year.
Stephen Jeffreys’ Caught in Flight screenplay follows Diana during the last two years of her life, when she became known less for her troubled marriage to Prince Charles than for her humanitarian causes, such as visiting AIDS patients and calling for an end to the use of land mines.
Note: Since 1997, the year Diana died in a Paris car crash, more than one hundred and fifty countries have signed a treaty banning the use of land mines. China, Iran, Israel, the United States, and Russia are among the three dozen that have refused to do so.
Also of note, not that long ago Naomi Watts was announced as a prospective Marilyn Monroe in the movie Blonde. In recent months, little has been heard about that particular project. (For her portrayal of Monroe, Michelle Williams is a 2012 Best Actress Oscar nominee for Simon Curtis’ My Week with Marilyn.)
Gael García Bernal to star in Zorro reboot
If all goes as planned…
According to Variety, Gael García Bernal is attached to star or costar in the following:
- 20th Century Fox’s futuristic Zorro reboot Zorro Reborn, with the titular character described as “a masked vigilante bent on revenge.”
- Matt Piedmont’s comedy Casa de mi Padre, with Will Ferrell and Diego Luna.
- Nicole Kassell’s A Little Bit of Heaven, with Kate Hudson and Peter Dinklage.
- Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Hands of Stone, playing Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran opposite Al Pacino and Ryan Kwanten.
And that’s not all: García Bernal is also planning to make a documentary about immigration.
Also as per Variety, Sony Pictures, which distributed the two relatively recent Zorro films starring Antonio Banderas – The Mask of Zorro (1998) and The Legend of Zorro (2005) – is developing its own revamped tale based on Isabel Allende’s novel Zorro – a prequel to the pop culture Zorro stories first featured in Johnston McCulley’s 1919 novella The Curse of Capistrano.
Not Jesus C., but James C. to be featured in Stallone–Schwarzenegger actioner
If all goes as planned…
Despite online headlines about Jesus Christ facing off against Rambo and the Terminator, The Passion of the Christ actor Jim Caviezel – not the biblical character – is the one who will get to play the overseer of a high-security prison in which Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are two inmates on their (illegal) way out (or so they hope) in Mikael Håfström’s The Tomb.
Now, stop and think about it: If Jesus were to battle Rambo and the Terminator, what kinds of weapons would be used? Love and compassion? A-bombs and hand grenades?
The philosophical possibilities are infinite. Just don’t expect to find any of them in this particular big-screen entry.
*last modified in January 2026.
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